Space Junk Solution? Japan Would Use a Tether to Nab Debris & Destroy It

The Japanese space agency will soon be testing a new technology that would use a roughly half-mile-long tether to grab large pieces of space debris and dispose of them. The proposed technology (first announced in 2014) would include a spacecraft that would deploy a 700-meter-long (2,296 feet) electrodynamic tether (EDT) and guide it toward a piece of space junk. The tether would latch onto the orbiting hunk of trash, and the operating spacecraft would then drag the debris down into the incinerat